Traditionally, billing systems typically employ two modes of charging. The first is online charging which is where the user effectively pre-pays for a service, and the second is offline charging where a user is billed after the service. Thus, the first charging method is implemented as a “pay-as-you-go” system, whereas the second method is implemented where the user is billed at regular intervals for services which the user has used.
The availability requirement from online charging platforms is typically much higher with respect to offline platforms. In addition, there are events that are processed using the online platform in order to ensure low latency, e.g., 200 ms, while other events do not require such a low latency. Further, network events that are processed by the charging platforms may arrive from many network elements and in different modes, i.e., as synchronous requests, batch files, etc. These factors lead to the need for bolstering the resources associated with online charging platforms.
Unfortunately, a problem often arises in that it is difficult to efficiently route events, such that only events that must be processed using the online charging platform are routed to such system, in order to reduce the volume and cost of online charging platforms. The difficulty in addressing this problem is further exacerbated due to the fact that there is no simple way of controlling this routing. For example, the arrival mode of an event (i.e. synchronous, batch, etc.) does not provide a clear indication as to whether the event is to be processed online or offline.
There is thus a need for overcoming these and/or other problems associated with the prior art.